Plastic is a relatively inexpensive, lightweight and durable material that has become an integral and useful part of our daily lives. Countless different types of products now contain plastic, and virtually every industry uses plastic in some form. However, because plastic is durable, it essentially does not degrade, or degrades very slowly, and therefore accumulates in landfills.
Re-use of resources by collecting and recycling plastics is one of the activities that is being practiced to address global environmental issues. Even though waste discarded from individual households or businesses is separated from other waste so as to collect plastic separately, in practice it is difficult to separate plastic by type at disposal sites. As a result, in order to re-use discarded plastic collected at waste stations, etc., it is necessary to reliably separate a few types of plastic, particularly those having high added value, at a specialized facility, such as a collecting plant. While this has already been practiced for some specific types of plastic, existing methods can be expensive and not appropriate for separation of large quantities of plastics.
There remains a need for separation methods that are capable of separating a large quantity of plastics with high precision and low cost to provide a separation which is acceptable for reuse of the plastics.